Events

Ms. Yezi Kang
PhD Candidate
University of Groningen

Organizations are increasingly adopting internal mobility (i.e., moving employees across teams within the organization) to develop talent or meet staffing needs, yet research has largely treated mobility as a discrete event in which movers suddenly leave their origin team and join their destination team. Little is known about how movers manage work and collaboration demands across their origin and destination teams during the transition. Drawing on a network responsiveness perspective, we examine how quickly movers form collaborations with their destination team and dissolve collaborations with their origin team, and how these collaboration responses during the transition shape their subsequent career development. Using longitudinal collaboration and personnel records from a healthcare organization, we find that faster formation of collaborations with the destination team is associated with greater integration into the team’s existing tasks, whereas slower decay of collaborations with the origin team enables movers to facilitate cross-team coordination by creating new collaborations between the two teams. This cross-team coordination is strongest when movers simultaneously form destination-team collaborations more quickly. Both task integration and cross-team coordination are positively associated with career advancement over the two years following a move. Further, our findings suggest that maintaining origin-team ties facilitates career advancement primarily when movers create new cross-team collaborations; simply maintaining ties without generating such new coordination does not yield the same career benefits. Overall, our findings highlight internal mobility as a dynamic transition process and demonstrate that how movers reconfigure their collaboration networks during this process has important implications for career advancement.